Buch lesen: «Secret Obsession»

CHAPTER ONE

‘I‘LL be back on Friday week,’ Ben said, his back to her but his reflection visible in the dressing-table mirror as his long fingers carefully knotted a blue silk tie, adjusted the set of his collar. Every movement was calm, unhurried, assured—as though he had all day to get ready.

It was Nerissa who was on edge, her blue eyes constantly glancing at the clock and away again quickly, before Ben noticed. He was too quick to pick up signals; he might start wondering why she was on tenterhooks to get him out of the house; he might ask questions and then she might panic and give away too much. That was what happened to a lot of people when Ben was interrogating them; she had watched it happen in court often enough—heard witnesses start stammering, go pale, flush, betray themselves.

From this angle she could see the razor-edge of his profile—intimidating, forceful, his mouth level, his grey eyes narrowed and intent. He smoothed down his tight-fitting waistcoat, checked the time by his watch.

Oh, God, why was he taking so long?

She took a deep breath to steady her voice, then said, ‘Your taxi’s waiting!’ It had arrived early; the meter must be ticking away.

‘I ordered it for eight o’clock and it is only just that now. He can wait,’ he said in that deep, curt voice which made her tension worse.

If he didn’t leave soon she was going to miss her train. In an agony of impatience she moved to the window, looked out through the lace curtain, saw the London street bathed in autumn sunlight, the horse-chestnut trees in the gardens opposite shedding their russet leaves in a brisk wind, having already shed the spiky orbs which split as they hit the ground, making it easier for the local boys to hunt among the leaves for the shiny brown nuts.

‘It’s going to be a beautiful day,’ she said in melancholic irony. Wasn’t that always the way? Weather always mocked you at times like this; it was never in the right mood.

It should be grey, elegiac, rain seeping down from dark clouds; the wind should howl across the city, or lightning strike the horse-chestnuts and set them blazing.

Instead, it was glorious out there—rich and glowing colours, a brilliant blue sky radiant with sunlight.

Ben clicked down the locks on his suitcase and lifted it to the floor. She hadn’t even packed yet—she hadn’t dared; it would have been too risky. She would throw a few things into a case while she waited for a taxi to come and collect her. She hadn’t dared call one, of course. Nothing must alert Ben to the possibility that she was going away too.

‘I’ll ring you tonight, from The Hague,’ he said.

She had her excuse ready, but her voice was slightly breathless, all the same. ‘I may have to work late; Gregory wants me to go out to Worcester to see a client. We don’t yet know the size of the job and it could take all day to assess. I don’t know what time I’ll get back.’

That much was true—Gregory had given her instructions for the job yesterday and she hadn’t told him that she wouldn’t be doing it. She would ring him later, before she left.

Ben’s arms slid round her waist and he rested his chin on top of her head, on the cloudy dark mass of hair she hadn’t yet brushed into order. She trembled as she felt his body touching her, his hands below her breasts, resting there lightly, the warmth of his blood reaching her through her jersey wool dress.

‘Are you going alone? Or with Gregory? I don’t trust Gregory an inch—I hope you don’t let him flirt with you!’ Ben was smiling as he said it, though. Her boss was a happily married man who had never shown the slightest interest in her. If Ben had even suspected that Gregory might fancy her his tone, his look would have been very different—and they both knew it.

‘As if I would!’ she said, trying to sound amused too, but so strung up that she couldn’t quite manage it. He made her so tense.

They had only been married for three months. It had been a whirlwind romance; she was still breathless. It had happened too fast for her to be quite sure what she was doing. There was so much about him that she did not know.

Of course, marriage was always a gamble. Until you actually lived with someone you could never be quite sure about them, but that was doubly true about Ben.

She had met him a year earlier, at a party given by one of his clients who happened to work with her. Nerissa had hardly known anyone in the crowded room and had backed into a corner with a glass of white wine. The host had brought Ben over and introduced them, then left again, and Ben had asked her a series of questions about herself to which he had got shy, monosyllabic replies.

She hadn’t thought she would ever see him again, but a few days later he had rung her at work and asked if they could have dinner. A little uncertainly she had accepted, and spent an evening with him at a well-known restaurant in Mayfair. They had talked—or rather, Ben had talked and she’d listened. Ben had asked questions and she’d given husky answers. Nerissa was not a talkative girl, but that didn’t seem to worry him.

Ben Havelock, she discovered, was a very successful and wealthy barrister. He had very little spare time, so they hadn’t seen much of each other during those early months. Last spring, however, he had managed to get a fortnight’s holiday and they had spent it together up in Northumberland, where she had been born and had spent most of her life.

That had been Ben’s idea. He wanted to get to know her better against her own background, he said. He already knew that London was not Nerissa’s territory; she had a lost look at times—she lacked the necessary skills for city life and wasn’t street-wise or sophisticated. Ben was a Londoner, a city man, with all that that implied of shrewd, hard-headed sophistication. Not much surprised him, but Nerissa was different. She intrigued him; he wanted to find out what lay behind her façade, where she came from, what people had bred her.

He had achieved his aim. She hadn’t wanted him to visit her home but he had insisted, and he had discovered a lot about her during those two weeks—more than she had meant him to know.

She had secrets she had wanted to keep; Ben had guessed at them within hours of their arrival. He worried her, disturbed her, but he had persuaded her to marry him all the same, in spite of her doubts and reservations.

‘It will work,’ he had promised her. ‘All you have to do is forget the past. This is a new beginning. For both of us.’

He had memories he wanted to forget, too. He had told her about them freely enough, yet she still felt uneasily that she did not really know him very well. She had thought that once they were man and wife she would really know and understand him, but there was a darkness in Ben which still locked her out. She was beginning to be afraid it would always be there—a wall around him through which she could not pass and which hid a side of him which worried her.

The taxi hooted and she jumped. ‘He’s getting impatient!’

‘Let him!’ Ben turned her round and lowered his head. His mouth was possessive. She felt her pulses quicken, her body begin to burn. That was one side of their marriage which worked; they were passionate lovers. In bed she could forget her uncertainties—she might not yet have the key to Ben’s mind, but his body was as familiar to her as her own.

Ben abruptly ended the kiss and, lifting his head, framed her face between his hands for a moment, staring at her as if trying to memorise the way she looked.

‘Is there something on your mind?’

The curt question made her heart do a back-flip. She had known it would be hard to deceive him; his training in court made him too accustomed to reading expressions, picking up nuances.

‘I’m not looking forward to being here alone, that’s all,’ she lied.

That was true enough and he knew it; she always felt uneasy about being in the house alone at night. London was a dangerous city, especially to a girl from a peaceful little village miles from anywhere.

He frowned but accepted the excuse. ‘Why don’t you ask one of the girls from work to stay with you while I’m away?’

‘I might do that,’ she murmured, knowing she wouldn’t because she wasn’t going to be here.

The taxi hooted again and Ben’s mouth indented impatiently. ‘I’d better go or I’ll miss my plane! If I don’t talk to you tonight I’ll ring tomorrow.’

He kissed her again, quickly, then he was gone. She heard his feet on the stairs, the front door opening, slamming shut.

Leaning her face on the cold glass of the window, she watched him walk rapidly across the pavement and get into the back of the taxi. He leaned sideways to look out and up at her, his face briefly visible before the taxi vanished—a hard-boned, sparefleshed face, cool grey eyes, a wide, controlled mouth, black hair springing from a window’s peak on his high forehead.

He would be a bad enemy, she thought, and her nerves tightened. When he found out that she had lied, discovered where she had gone, she was going to find out just how dangerous an enemy Ben could be.

His hand lifted for a second; she waved back, then the taxi turned the corner and Nerissa hurried away from the window. She packed her case first, not caring what she folded into it—it wouldn’t matter what she looked like so long as she took warm clothes with her; it would be cold up there.

Downstairs in the kitchen she left a note on the table for the girl who did their cleaning and had her own key to the house. Then she went into Ben’s study, rang for another taxi, then switched on the answering machine to record phone calls, including those from Ben later, or any from his secretary, Helen Manners, a slim blonde woman in her late twenties who had made her dislike for Nerissa clear from the minute they had met.

As she leaned over the desk Nerissa’s eye was caught by their wedding photo, half buried among a pile of law books.

They had been married on a summer morning—a civil ceremony with only a few guests—some family and a handful of friends. It hadn’t felt like a real wedding, somehow; Nerissa had always believed that when she married it would be in her local village church, among the people with whom she had grown up. That brisk, businesslike exchange of vows in London had had no romance, no sense of joy. She had gone through it numbly, with a sense of disbelief.

Helen Manners had been there, very elegant in an olive-green silk dress, her blonde hair piled on her head in a French pleat and pinned there by a large bow made of the same material as her dress. She had long, shapely legs and displayed her tiny feet in handmade black high-heels; she had expensive tastes.

Nerissa didn’t like her and it was mutual. Helen had raised one perfectly drawn black brow as she’d run her scornful eyes over Nerissa’s plain, creamcoloured dress and the Victorian posy of summer flowers she carried in a silver holder.

Ben had seemed oblivious of his secretary’s hostility to his new wife, just as he was indifferent to his sister’s dislike of Nerissa. Ben’s sister hadn’t even come to the wedding, in fact. But then neither had any of Nerissa’s family.

It had been an odd wedding.

Nerissa stared at Ben’s face in the photo—tough and uncompromising, his eyes locked and hiding secrets.

Nerissa turned away, biting her lip. When he found out…She couldn’t even bear to imagine what he would do to her. He was capable of killing; she was convinced of that. The dark vein in his nature ran deep, and his pride was stony, unbending. Any injury to that pride was never forgiven.

She shivered, which reminded her that she was going north—the weather at this time of the year would be cool if not downright chilly. She went back upstairs and found a warm, heather-coloured tweed coat, a purple woollen scarf and knitted gloves that matched—a Christmas present from Aunt Grace last year. Aunt Grace always made the presents she gave; she was very good with her hands, could sew and knit expertly. For much of Nerissa’s life Aunt Grace had made most of her clothes on the sewing-machine in the little sewing-room looking out over the farm orchard.

Nerissa stiffened as she heard the unmistakable sound of a taxi throbbing away outside.

She ran downstairs and picked up her case, opened the front door and hurried out—a slightly built, almost fragile girl, with a wild cloud of dark hair around a pale, triangular face, dominated by those huge, cornflower-blue eyes.

‘Where are we going, Snow White?’ joked the taxi driver, turning to stare at her.

‘King’s Cross station, please.’

He started off, saying over his shoulder, ‘Where are you off to, then, love?’

‘Durham,’ she said, hoping he wasn’t going to talk to her all the way. She was in no mood for a light chat with a taxi driver. She had too much on her mind.

‘Never been there—what’s it like?’

Nerissa stared out of the window at London’s busy, crowded streets and thought of the wind off the moors, the open sky, the dinosaur contours of the green and brown hills with their rounded shanks and bony shoulders lifting against the horizon.

She had missed it, ever since she’d left just over a year ago. She realised suddenly how much she ached to see it again.

‘Cold, at this time of year,’ she said. ‘Durham is almost in Scotland, you know.’

‘Don’t fancy that much; give me lots of sun, that’s what I need, especially in winter.’ The taxi driver began to tell her about his holiday in Spain and how hot it had been there last month on the beaches of Torremolinos. Nerissa heard one word in every three.

She caught her train by the skin of her teeth. She had reserved a seat but her compartment was halfempty anyway, and got emptier as the journey continued up north. The train was an express and only stopped at a few stations—the important cities along this route. At intervals someone came round with a trolley containing sandwiches, crisps, drinks, but she wasn’t hungry so she just had a coffee midmorning. She spent the long journey staring out at the changing scene—the smoke-blackened chimneys of London, the grey and yellow London brick, the dull red tiles in the endless rows of little houses as they flashed through the suburbs, and then the flat, rather scrubby fields and hedgerows which succeeded them before they broke out into the real countryside of the heart of England.

By the time they were in the Midlands the sun was quite warm on the window, summer’s last, flickering, expiring flame moving over the landscape, the autumnal trees, the stubbled fields, the mist-hazed hills in the distance.

She had not been north since the spring, since that visit with Ben, since her marriage.

Had she changed? she wondered, trying to remember how she had felt before she’d met Ben, how she had felt as she’d made that first journey southwards to work in London.

She grimaced, still staring out at the countryside flashing past. Of course she had. A lot had happened to her in London. She was very different from the girl who had left the farm all those months ago.

Would they notice? Did it show—was it visible? She bit her lip. Philip would see it; he knew her better than anyone else in the world. He would know at once that the Nerissa who had come back to them was not the same girl who had left the north a year ago to work in London.

Except that Philip might never get the chance to notice anything about her.

She flinched at that idea, her skin white, stretched, taut. Stop it! she told herself. Don’t even think it. He is not going to die.

She looked at her watch; they were running to time. They would pull into York any minute, not much longer now. Her uncle would meet her at Durham. He would have the latest news.

As the train slowly steamed into Durham she collected her case and her other belongings and a moment later stepped down on to the platform, her long, slender legs admired by one of the porters hanging about waiting for someone to require his services.

‘Carry your bag, miss?’ he asked, but she shook her head.

‘I can manage, thank you.’ She hurried away with her case; it wasn’t very heavy.

She saw her uncle before she reached him and waved, breaking into a run.

He hadn’t changed, which was one comfort. Still tall and loose-limbed with iron-grey hair, a weathered countenance, deep-sunk pale eyes, John Thornton was a man who spent most of his days out in the open and it showed. Sun and wind had given him a skin like leather, the horizon-gazing eyes of a sailor and the slow patience of a ruminating animal—like those he looked after on his farm, the wiry upland sheep of the Northumberland hills.

‘Nerissa—thank God you’re here. We need a miracle.’

He bent and kissed her cheek, took her case from her. ‘I was afraid your husband might not want you to come.’

‘Ben’s away, abroad.’

Their eyes met, exchanged wordless understanding. ‘How long for?’

‘A week,’ she said, and saw her uncle’s face tighten.

‘A week? It’s going to take longer than a week.’

She had realised as much, had known as she left her home that she was going for a long time. She hadn’t been able to face telling Ben; she had known how he would react. His pride would never have agreed to letting her come. He would see it as a betrayal, a choice between him and Philip, and in a sense she supposed it was, but in another sense she had had no choice. She had had to come.

‘How is he?’

‘Bad.’ The monosyllable was flat yet filled with pain.

Her eyes stung with unshed tears. As they walked out of the station Nerissa slipped her hand through her uncle’s arm in a gesture of silent comfort.

He squeezed her hand against his side with an affectionate look, but didn’t say anything. He was not a man who said much; he had spent so much time alone in the fields that he had almost lost the habit of speech. That was one reason why she had grown up saying so little, why she was disturbed by noise and busy city streets. Silence had been her environment for so many years.

‘You’ll want some food; they never have anything worth eating on the train these days,’ he said as they drove away.

‘I’m not hungry!’

‘Nay, you must eat!’ He shook his head at her, half smiled. ‘Grace told me to make sure you did. Won’t do any of us any good if you get ill too! We’ll stop at a pub on the way, get a bite to eat there.’

They stopped at a pub just a stone’s throw from the hospital, found a seat in a corner, then John Thornton went up to the bar to order them both a ploughman’s platter—chunks of local cheese with pickles and salad and home-made bread.

‘How’s Aunt Grace bearing up?’ Nerissa asked, sipping her glass of cider which had a strong, homebrewed taste of fermented apples, rich, golden, autumnal, sending a warm glow through her and making her feel slightly less strung up.

Her uncle looked sombre. ‘She never leaves him. She’s sat by his bed ever since it happened, talking to him. She’s certain he’ll hear her voice and start to wake up.’

A pang hit Nerissa. She bit her lip. ‘How long is it now?’

‘Since he went into coma? Three days. We thought…hoped…he’d come out of it sooner, but he hasn’t, and the doctors can’t tell us when he will…if he will.’ His hands curled into helpless fists on the table between them.

‘Of course he’s going to get better! You mustn’t think like that. It isn’t like you to give up.’ She gently uncurled his fingers, held them tightly. ‘You know Aunt Grace won’t stop talking until he wakes up in self-defence!’

He gave a reluctant chuckle. ‘You bad girl, you! Lucky for you she can’t hear you!’

Nerissa smiled at him. ‘Have you finished your drink? Shall we go?’

If only took a few minutes to reach the hospital. She had spent a few days there once, years ago, when she’d had her tonsils out. The smell of polish and disinfectant and soap was familiar; her nostrils wrinkled at it. Their footsteps echoed on the stone floors as they tramped for what seemed hours along cream-painted corridors, up stairs, along more corridors, until they reached the intensive care unit where Philip Thornton lay, on a life-support system.

His mother sat beside the bed watching him unwearyingly and for a few seconds Nerissa and her uncle stood in the doorway, watching her while she was unaware of them, so intent on her son that she had no attention to spare for anything else.

Nerissa looked at him, too—and away again, appalled by what she saw. Everything his father had told her was suddenly a reality, in front of her; she hadn’t believed it fully until that moment—now she had to.

It was a relief to look at her aunt instead. Grace Thornton was the opposite of her husband. Where he was tall, she was short; where he was thin, she was plump. His skin was brown and weather-beaten; hers was as soft as a rose-petal and as rosy as an apple.

His eyes were very pale blue and deep-sunk; hers were slightly protuberant, very bright and a warm, rich brown, and her curly, goldy-brown hair showed no trace of the grey which had taken over in his hair.

Her voice was soft and warm; it flowed unceasingly while Nerissa and John Thornton listened. She had always done all the talking in the family while her husband and her son and Nerissa listened, and it was somehow reassuring to hear her talking now—it made the alien hospital surroundings seem more homely.

‘And the top field will be given a dressing this next week—if your father gets round to it—now the ploughing’s done. The turnips are coming on nice, then when the sheep have eaten all the grass we can turn them into the top field to eat turnip tops—and turnips too, if need be. Did I tell you the vet had been to see that ewe we thought might be carrying? Well, she wasn’t. Hardly worth keeping her; she hasn’t lambed for eighteen months. Past it, I reckon. She can go to market with the others next time.’

John Thornton moved forward and his wife stopped talking and turned her head. She saw Nerissa and her face lit up.

‘Here’s your father now, Philip,’ she said conversationally. ‘And Nerissa’s with him! There, I told you she’d come, didn’t I? And she looks just the same; she hasn’t changed.’

She got up and held out her arms; Nerissa ran into them and they hugged, kissing. Aunt Grace moved back to look at her, tears sparkling in her bright brown eyes.

‘You look well. She looks well, Philip. Lost weight, mind. Skinnier than ever! Don’t you eat down there in London? Did your uncle take you to have a bite to eat before you came here? I told him to make sure you got some lunch first—I know those trains—nothing but sandwiches and crisps; that’s all you get on them these days. In the old days they had a proper buffet car and a three-course lunch, with waiters in white coats and silver cutlery and good glasses on the table, but these days they can’t be bothered.’

‘We stopped and had a ploughman’s in a pub,’ Nerissa said, and her aunt clucked her tongue.

‘Is that all? Did you hear that, Philip? Isn’t that just like your father? John Thornton, you should have taken her somewhere better than that. A bite of cheese and some bread isn’t a fit meal for anyone but a mouse.’

‘She said she wasn’t hungry!’

‘You shouldn’t have taken any notice of her!’

Nerissa had stopped listening. She moved to the bedside and looked down at Philip, her heart wrung, wanting to cry. The top of his head was bandaged, domed, only his face visible. He had been shaved, she noted. There was no sign of stubble on his cheek and she knew that Philip needed to shave every day. He had once stopped shaving for a weekend camping trip on Hadrian’s Wall, not far from his home, and come back on the Monday morning with the rough beginnings of a curly brown beard.

His mother wasn’t talking any more. She was watching her niece. ‘Say hello to him, Nerissa. He can hear you; they say he can, even if he isn’t showing any signs. You know she’s here, don’t you, Philip? You’re waiting for her to talk to you.’

His hand lay on the white coverlet, brown and strong, with wide-spanned fingers, nails cut very short, a practical hand used to hard manual work. Nerissa touched it lightly, whispered, ‘Hello, Philip, it’s me.’

‘Say your name,’ her uncle urged her. ‘Say, it’s Nerissa.’

‘He knows,’ Grace Thornton said, still watching Nerissa. ‘I told him she was here, didn’t I? Not that I needed to; he’ll have known her voice the minute he heard it. We’ll go and have a cup of tea, Nerissa, and leave you to talk to him.’

Nerissa didn’t look round, just nodded. She heard them go out, heard the door click softly into place. She sank down on the chair her aunt had been sitting on and picked up Philip’s hand, stroked it lightly.

‘I’m sorry I haven’t come until now. Your father only rang me yesterday.’

It had been one of the biggest shocks of her life. She had been at work, had picked up the phone expecting it to be a business call and heard her uncle’s voice with a start of alarm. She had known it couldn’t be good news; he wouldn’t ring her at work for that.

‘I came as soon as I could,’ she added. She couldn’t get over the blankness of his face. The emptiness. His features unmoving, unchanging.

This is how he would look if he were dead, Nerissa thought, and her body winced in pain. Maybe he is dying? If they switched off this life-support machine would he die?

‘Darling, wake up!’ Urgency possessed her. She was afraid to touch his face, afraid of jarring his head, so she put her face down against his hand and kissed it, held it to her cheek. She had half expected his skin to be cold but it was warm; she put her lips against his inner wrist and felt the blood pumping sluggishly there, in the blue vein which she could see threading beneath the skin.

‘Wake up, Philip!’ she whispered against this one sign of Me in him.

There was no response, of course; she didn’t expect any. He had lain like this ever since the car crash in which he had suffered head injuries necessitating surgery—surgery which had physically relieved the pressure on his brain, her uncle had told her, but had left him like this, in a deep coma.

She couldn’t bear the idea of Philip dying. They had grown up together, as close as twins. For most of her life Philip had been the most important person in the world to her.

Behind her she heard the door open and sat up quickly, still holding his hand.

‘You must be his cousin,’ said a friendly voice and she turned to see a nurse behind her. ‘Hello, I’m his day special—I look after him during the day. He has someone else at night. I’m Staff Nurse Courtney.’

Nerissa smiled shyly at her. ‘Hello.’

‘How do you think he’s looking?’ The shrewd brown eyes watched her. ‘Bit of a shock, I expect, seeing him like this, but his condition has stabilised; there’s been no deterioration over the last couple of days.’

‘Does that mean he’s getting better?’ Nerissa asked hopefully, and saw the other girl hesitate.

‘Not exactly. It just means he isn’t getting any worse, which, believe me, is a hopeful sign.’

Nerissa’s face fell and Nurse Courtney quickly added, ‘It could mean he is going to take a turn for the better any minute. His mother’s doing a wonderful job and now you’re here, too. Keep talking to him; he needs all the stimulation he can get, anything that keeps jogging his brain.’

She left a few minutes later and Nerissa sat down beside Philip again and took his hand. ‘Do you like her?’ she asked him conversationally. ‘She has a very nice face—it matches her voice. I think you’ll like her. She’s the one who shaves you every day, she says. She’s good at it, too; you couldn’t do better yourself.’

His parents came back while she was telling him that it had started to rain. ‘Typical—it was wonderful weather in London, but I get back here and down comes the rain! It’s a wonder we don’t all have gills and fins, the rain we get up here.’